The Slippery Slope/The Psychology of Pauperism
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PAUPERISM
"Mankind have nothing to stir them to action but their needs, which it is wisdom to relieve but folly to remove."—Mandeville, "Fable of the Bees."
Pauperism is a dismal subject, and many people nowadays are apt to be impatient at the very mention of it: they regard it as an abstraction, a bogey to frighten the timid away from the paths of what is known to politicians under the name of "social reform." Those who have read its past history, and still more those who have seen it in the concrete, and have, over a long series of years, watched its devastating influence upon human character, know that it is the chief reason why many schemes which have been suggested and put in practice for the improvement of the condition of the poor have hitherto met with so small a measure of success, or failed altogether. It is for this reason that we must, if we are to make any real progress, face this difficulty from the outset. If we do not face it we must be content to be for ever rolling a stone uphill, as many generations of philanthropists have done in the past, as many philanthropists are doing even now. There is perhaps no question in which natural impulses are so much at variance with the teaching of experience and in which there are so many apparent paradoxes. There is certainly no question in which so much initial patience and humility is required from those who wish to find the right way, and patience and humility are by no means so common amongst philanthropists as we should expect them to be. At the same time there is no reason to despair. Social questions have been studied more closely in the last thirty years than they have ever been before, and already there are many signs that people in general are becoming much more conscious of their difficulties, and much more ready to recognise that the study of the problem of poverty is a science in itself. It is true that, for the moment, there are many forces, sentimental and political, which are adverse to its full application, but one can but believe that these will gradually disappear as the enlightenment of the community upon the subject becomes more complete.
We have, then, first of all to be clear in our minds as to what we mean by the word "pauperism." Though the Latin word pauper only means a poor person, "pauperism" has acquired by use a quite different signification from poverty. In a healthy community there may be many poor; there cannot be many paupers. In this country most of the people are poor in that they live upon a wage, weekly or otherwise, and have no accumulated wealth. Yet to-day the great majority of the people are self-supporting. So, too, with other countries. In Norway, nearly all are poor, yet, probably for that very reason, there are few paupers. Pauperism presupposes the means of pauperisation, which can hardly be said to exist in that country, and we find there one of the finest peasant populations in the world, both physically and morally.
What, then, is pauperism? The answer is, that it is in its essence a question of character rather than of externals. It is, so to speak, a negation, a loss of something, rather than a positive quality. Pauperism is associated in the minds of many with vice and crime, and it is true that these are often its ultimate development. But for all that they are not of its essence. Many a pauper is at first neither vicious nor criminal. Many people who are both vicious and criminal are not paupers. The first step in pauperism is to the average man analogous to the loss of virtue in a woman. He is never quite the same again. Though there are some who have the strength of will to resist its further stages, yet to the many it means the gradual mildew of the spirit, the blunting of energy both physical and moral, and the loss of responsibility and self-control. It is an insidious thing, and attacks human nature on its weakest side, the side of its indolence, and the danger is common to rich and poor. It is the outward expression of the economic law, which is as inexorable as the law of gravitation, that average human nature, like everything in the physical world, follows the line of least resistance, or, in other words, takes life in the easiest way. The pauper is not so much a poor person as a poor creature. There are paupers among the rich as well as among the poor, but they have had at least the opportunities of higher education and different environment. The poor have no such safeguard. The first step downwards, once taken, leads to an abyss which has no bottom. Many of us will remember one of George Eliot's best known characters who "at first had no thoughts that were base, but because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant … he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds that make men infamous. … He betrayed every trust that he might keep himself safe—yet calamity overtook him." Pauperism is the loss of grit, initiative, gumption, self-respect—what you will. Its insidiousness lies in the fact that it appeals to the weakest side of human nature.
What, then, is the most potent antidote to this tendency which is common to all? It is to be found in one thing and one thing only, namely, in the discipline of life which has been imposed upon all as a corrective of natural indolence. The discipline of life is a subtle force which presents itself to different people in different ways, but which is always a spur to activity either of hand or brain, the alternative to which is stagnation and decay. "Life anywhere will swallow a man unless he rise vigorously and try to swallow it." We often hear of the "idle rich." Why is it that many of them are so? It is because the stimulus of the discipline of life has been removed from them by their riches and they have found no discipline of the will to take its place. As their numbers are comparatively small, they are not, except for the example they set, a national danger. With the poor it is otherwise. They constitute the nation, and the destiny of the nation is bound up with theirs. If we remove from large sections of the population this driving force we remove the mainspring of their activity, and withdraw from under them the prop and stay that prevents them from sinking into the slough of pauperism. For them that discipline consists in the forces of self-preservation, in the maintenance of themselves and those who depend upon them, and in the love of family and home life which is the root and anchor of self-control and self-sacrifice. For them, above all, these virtues, which it is the fashion nowadays to ignore or to deride as impossible, are essential, because when they are lost "calamity overtakes them" and "life swallows them up." We know that such virtues are not impossible, because amongst the non-pauperised population we find them existing as strongly as ever. The struggle is a hard one, especially to those who are on the borderland, but it is by it that character is made. The temptation to take what seems the easier way is ever present. Every unhappy tramp or mendicant has learnt his first lesson in dependence from some dole of charity or of the Poor Law, and "calamity has overtaken him."
"It is reluctance on the part of the poor man to become a pauper which forms the mighty barrier against the extension of pauperism. … There is not a labourer in the country, however well paid he might be, who might not become a pauper at the first moment of his decaying strength or declining wages. … To relax the industry by a very little, or to let down to a small and imperceptible extent the economical habits, … these are the simple expedients by which, when once the mighty hold of self-dependence is loosened, the daily increasing thousands of a city population may in the shape of famished wives, ragged children, or destitute old men inundate the amplest charity." These words were written by Dr Chalmers more than half a century ago. They are as true now as ever they were. The first step towards pauperism is the crucial one. The virtue has gone out of a man and the inward decay has begun.
Pauperism, therefore, is a question of character affecting large masses of the people. Till within the last few years it had been a gradually disappearing factor in this country. But since, roughly speaking, the beginning of the nineties there has been a reaction. Our great object - lesson in pauperism in England is the old Poor Law, and we may take it for granted that every one has some knowledge of the conditions of those times. It is only necessary to say that it brought this country nearer to ruin than anything before or since, and that before 1834 pauperism was a canker which, as was said at the time, was fast consuming the vitals of the nation.
But we have no need to go back so far for illustrations of the intimate connection between Poor Law administration and pauperism. At the present time, wherever administration is free and easy—or, as some would call it, humane—there we find a high rate of pauperism; wherever it is careful and strict, we find a low one. Professor Fawcett's dictum that "you may have as many paupers as you choose to pay for" is no less true to-day than it was seventy years ago. The rise and fall of pauperism over the last century coincides almost exactly with the ebb and flow of administration. Of course there have been crises like the Manchester and Irish famines which have created extraordinary conditions, but in normal times every year's experience has added additional testimony to its truth. The remarkable variations in the pauperism of different Unions at the present time tell the same tale. Why is it, for example, to take the West End of London, that the pauperism of St George's, Hanover Square, is 31.3 per 1000 whilst that of Fulham, a much poorer district, is only 17.7 per 1000? Why is it, if we take the Northern district, that pauperism in Islington is 34.7 per 1000, whilst in Hackney it is only 27.9? Why is it that in the Eastern district, where there is uniformity of poverty, the pauperism of Poplar is 57.6, whilst that of Bethnal Green is only 27.4 and that of Whitechapel and St George's only 33? Or, if we compare East with West, why is it that St George's, Hanover Square, though its population is smaller, has more than 300 more paupers than Bethnal Green? There can, of course, be only one answer, namely, that these Unions have adopted different methods of administration.
The principle applies to the country as well as to the towns. In such places as Bradfield, Brixworth, and Atcham, where a strict system at one time prevailed, though they have most of them reverted to less stringent methods, the rate of pauperism is still much lower than in surrounding Unions. Perhaps enough has been said by figures and illustration to show the closeness of the connection between methods of administration and pauperism; but as many people have a rooted distrust of statistics, which they say "may be made to prove anything," it may be well to submit the question to some further analysis, and to look at it, so to speak, from behind the scenes. Some years ago the Bethnal Green Board appointed a special Committee to consider their own system of out-relief, which was then what is known as a "lax" one, almost anyone who applied being able to get it, though in very small doses. This Committee took the evidence of their relieving officers and examined their books and records. The conclusions that they came to are of some general interest. In the first place, it was clear that the great majority of the cases were chronic: one relieving officer had had the same cases in his books on and off for over twenty years. Another said that 70 to 80 per cent, of his cases were chronic. Then, again, the habit of applying for relief ran in certain families and in certain streets and localities. In some cases three generations of the same family were upon the books, and there was abundant evidence of hereditary pauperism. It was contagious. "The people on the ground floor apply because the people on the upper floor are having it." In some streets the mere sight of the relieving officer brought in a crop of applications the next day. "Our visits," they said, "manufacture applications." But perhaps this is to elaborate too much what is an obvious proposition. Of course poor people will apply for what they believe to be their share of a fund which is in their eyes inexhaustible and specially intended for them; would anyone refrain from increasing his income if he could do so simply by the asking? But soon the "amplest charity," the most "free and easy" poor law, is inundated and overwhelmed. It has been so in Poplar, West Ham, and other Unions in and about London. It was so again and again in France in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods, when they tried to put into practice the teaching of Rousseau. Sooner or later the reaction comes, the public purse is exhausted, and poor people are left to face the world robbed of their only real resources, namely, those that lie in themselves. Seventy years ago practically the whole population was in the clutches of the Poor Law. Then came the great struggle of 1834, and practical emancipation. Now we are again upon the top of a reaction. Since 1900 the official figures of pauperism have been steadily on the upgrade, and we have now a huge volume of State relief which is outside the Poor Law altogether. Of course the official figures do not measure exactly the number of those who have acquired the pauper spirit. Exceptional crises may from time to time swell the figures with those who are far from being paupers. At all times there are included in them some who cannot rightly be regarded as such. But political economy deals with tendencies, and from that point of view the official figures may fairly be taken as a test. When we find two Unions externally identical, of which the one has double the pauperism of the other, we know that the process of pauperisation has set in, and that large numbers of the poor have been tempted to give up the struggle for life and to surrender their independence. We know also that calamity overtakes them, and that of all policies this is the most inhuman.
Such appear, then, to be the main features of the problem of pauperism. Its main antidote heretofore has been the discipline of life which has enforced prudence, self-restraint, and self-sacrifice for the sake of others. If this is to be removed something will have to take its place, for pauperism, which is the negative of these virtues, will not suffer itself to be ignored or treated by methods of obscurantism. The alteration now proposed is the discipline of the law with inspector and policeman in the background. We may be permitted to doubt whether it will prove less irksome or equally effective.